Keep the Change

17

Ralph of Ralph’s Repair died. Joe couldn’t exactly remember him but evidently he’d repaired some things for him in the past. Lureen called and said that she and Smitty had legal business in Billings and would Joe be kind enough to represent the family at the funeral. Ralph was cremated and an old couple in almost matching light blue pantsuits came out from Yakima for the jar. “Do you know those people?” asked Mary Lynn Anderson, the piano teacher from Rapelje. Mary Lynn had recently been dried out at the Rimrock Foundation in Billings and she had this maddening energy, a real born-again quality that was entirely trained on making up for lost time. She wore a cotton checked shirt of pale green that set off her tanned arms. She used to look religious when she was drinking, spiritually enraptured, but dried out she looked oversexed.

“Who are those people?” she asked Joe specifically, looking at the old people.

“Some kind of connections of Ralph’s,” Joe said.

“His folks?”

“Beats me. Somebody told me when I came in that’s who they were.”

“I sent some flowers to the family. I wonder if they got there.”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I don’t want to put them under pressure but I’d sure as heck like to know if my flowers ever got there. There was a note too.”

The memorial service was being held at the little Carnegie library. Joe hadn’t been to one of these since his Uncle Jerry was run over by a uranium truck. There were nine people there and five of them were browsing in the stacks. They had agreed to avoid a conventional service as being unsuited to Ralph’s memory. The result was that nothing was happening. And in fact, Mildred Davis was trying to renew her library card and her husband Charlie was reading Field and Stream. Charlie was famous from opening up on his fourteen-year-old son with his fists for being in town without his cowboy hat on. Terry Smith had a Bible but he was completely furtive about it. Billy Kelton came in wearing his yellow slicker. He stared over at Joe, trying to remember him; Joe didn’t help. Then Billy must have recalled their childhood differences, and he looked off in embarrassment. Joe still burned at those memories. Everyone went to the window to watch the new rain. “God, we needed that,” said Alvie Skibstad, his gleaming white forehead contrasting with his dark face. “Take some of the fun out of it for the hoppers.” Jim Carter came in the door soaked. He was only nineteen but his father had Alzheimer’s and Jim had been running the ranch since he was fifteen; he bore the kind of weariness people rarely have at that age. “Headgate burst and run out over Main Street. The dry goods store is flooded.” Charlie Davis looked up from Field and Stream, and said, “It happens every year.” “Naw, it don’t,” said Jim, tired of old-timers’ bullshit, tired in general.

“I hope this doesn’t sound disrespectful,” said Mildred Davis, “but we’re sure going to miss Ralph when things are broken.” The only place she had been able to find to sit was behind the counter where the librarian usually sat. She wore a dark blue dress and a pillbox hat from which a piece of starchy lace projected, as though subtly indicating the prevailing wind. The old couple from Yakima looked around like a pair of immigrants.

“Nope,” said Charlie. He licked the ends of the first two fingers of his right hand and began madly leafing through the magazine as though he’d left his social security card in there somewhere. “It doesn’t sound disrespectful.”

They all sat around vaguely, unmotivated; heads began to hang at odd angles. Nothing is an emergency around here, Joe thought, and I’m not so sure that’s good.

“I wonder if we ought to say something about Ralph?” Joe asked. Billy was now staring at him. Nobody said anything. A couple of people looked like they might have wanted to but couldn’t quite come up with the right idea. “Well,” Joe said, “I don’t mind saying a few words. For all these years, when we have had things broken, little things, important things, things which allowed our lives to flow, Ralph was there to set them spinning along again and with them, our lives too seemed repaired, whether it was a toaster, a television, a tractor, or a tire.”

“You’re thinking of Ralph’s over to Lewistown,” said Billy Kelton.

“I am?”

“Yeah, this one only did appliances.”

“Well, I think appliances have become central to our lives,” Joe said.

“Forget it.”

A silence fell. Billy looked around. He caught the eyes of the connections from Yakima, and then addressed them. There was fire in his eyes.

“The Bible makes us the promise that our dead ones will live,” he told them in a clear and direct voice. “They will rise up. ‘The righteous themselves will possess the earth and they will reside forever upon it.’ I don’t know who exactly you are to Ralph but you may feel the lamentation of King David at the death of Absalom. And if so, we remind you that God did not originally intend for us to die. But because of the Adam and Eve business, he pretty much had to let us all return to dust as a payment for sin. But what we expect around these parts is that at the time of the Resurrection, Ralph’s got a better than even chance of being called and that’s about all you can ask. We knew him fairly well.” It got pleasantly quiet as everyone took this in.

People began to leave. “I’ll lock up,” said Mildred Davis. Joe went out. For some reason, the smell of newly turned gardens along the street reminded him of the ocean and impressions came back of heat and rain, of docks steaming after a cloudburst. He thought of the repairs of Ralph. He couldn’t quite seem to place Ralph. He guessed he had made that fairly clear. I’ve got to get out of this fog, Joe thought. He just couldn’t believe he’d gotten the wrong fucking Ralph.